Toward the end of 2016, my long-running Pathfinder group got bored with our campaign and decided to try something else. We’d been interested in dipping our toes into 5th Edition D&D for a while, just to see how the game had changed, so my associate, Rich, volunteered to run the first published campaign, which is titled “Something Something Dragons”.

I’m pretty sure that’s it.

Anyway.

D&D characters are basically the only things Spud enjoys drawing, so I’ve spent the past month giddily scratching out illustrations for our four brave looter/arsonists. And because I knew I would need to squeeze a blog article out of the exercise, I recorded the colouring process to produce time lapse art videos set to thematically appropriate music.

So, let’s meet the new family!

When I started this blog, I had a very simple philosophy in mind: rather than pushing for frequent updates, I would concentrate on posting only a consistently high quality of work. My vision was that someone who paged through my catalog of posts would only see a string of detailed posts about my best work, with no blatant filler to skip over. That guiding philosophy is why I average only one blog post per month– I only produce one nice thing every month, on average, so that’s how often I have something to write about.

Some months, however, I find myself not having been as productive as usual, and thus I have nothing to write about when the vague monthly post deadline comes up. Occasionally I can dredge up an older unpublished project to fill the gap– and I actually do have a really fun one from about 14 months ago that I never got around to– however, this month I’m just not feeling it. Due to personal life events and global tragedies alike, my reserves of creativity are running fairly low at the moment. But rather than let the month simply slip by with no post, I’m going to make a one-time exception and go against my core philosophy.

That’s right, folks: it’s time for Spud to post some absolute garbage. 😀

So, right off the bat, I want to explain that it’s taken me four months just to figure out how to present what I’m about to share with you. It’s a sprawling project that incorporates narrative fiction, detailed mission writeups, character art, terrain work, web design, and a ton of homebrew rules. I’ve tried to assemble written, audio, and video commentaries to present what I built, but in each case, I found that giving my usual detailed blow-by-blow of the work just ended up being really long and tedious. I keep going back to the drawing board to find a new way to encapsulate everything for you, and I keep coming up with bad solutions.

I’ve been at this for five months, and I don’t think I’m going to have any more success in the next five than I did in the last five. So rather than continue this fruitless struggle, I’m going to concede that I will probably never figure out a way to present the project with all of the context that I would have wanted. It was just too big.

So, yaknow what?

Screw it. I won’t even bother.

Behold the monster that devoured Spud’s summer:

If anyone’s unsure about whether to click that link, here’s a quick FAQ to explain what it is.

Apparently this was a colouring weekend.

This little lady is a tattoo-loving gnome played by someone in my Pathfinder group. I really enjoyed trying to match my drawing to his mental picture. 😀

As always, you may click to embiggen.

I know most of my readership doesn’t really care about these art posts, but they’re my favourite content to go back and re-view later, so I’m gonna keep making them periodically. Because on top of everything else Spud is, he is also his own most important readership demographic.

-Spud